Few Open Source analysis and visualization software tools exist that are capable of operating directly on unstructured grid data. Those that do exist are not comprehensive in the capabilities they offer, do not scale adequately, or both. Recognizing this gap in much-needed capability, Project Raijin-funded by an NSF EarthCube award-and the DOE SEATS project, launched a collaborative effort to develop an open source Python package called UXarray.

UXarray aims to address the geoscience community need for tools that enable standard data analysis techniques to operate directly on unstructured grids. It extends upon and inherits from the commonly used Xarray Python package to provide a powerful and familiar interface for working with unstructured grids in Python. UXarray provides Xarray styled functions to better read in and use unstructured grid datasets that follow standard conventions, including UGRID, MPAS, SCRIP, and Exodus formats.